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In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, we find a
spaceship full of people who say they were one of three ships escaping
a doomed planet. The "A" ship carried the great leaders, scientists,
and thinkers. The "C" ship carried the workers, those who actually
made things. Theirs, the "B" ship, consisted of middle managers,
hairdressers, telephone sanitizers, and the like. It eventually
becomes clear that their planet was not in fact doomed, and that they
were the victims of a ploy to rid their world of a useless third of
the population.
The story introduced many Americans to the job title "telephone sanitizer", and most Americans seem to think it means just that: a tradesman who comes to your house to sanitize the telephone. The term is, in fact, a characteristically British euphemism for toilet cleaner. Think about it. If you were going to have a tradesman come to your house to clean one thing, would it be the telephone? The euphemism was coined in London in the early 20s when the W.C. (Water Closet) was still something of a novelty. A working-class housewife would clean it herself if she had one, and upper-class people had staff to clean everything, but there was a big swath of middle-classdom where the lady of the house would do most of the cleaning, but was unwilling to clean this new fixture. Not surprisingly, a trade of travelling toilet cleaners emerged. They would also fix common problems, like leaking valves. Now, for a socially aspiring middle class family, it wasn't quite the thing to have a truck parked in front of their house marked "Kensington W.C. Cleaning" or "Brompton Crapper Swabout," broadcasting the messages: (a) we don't have staff, and (b) our W.C. is dirty. So some enterprising toilet cleaner stencilled "Telephone Sanitizing" on the side of his truck. Carrying positive associations of modernity (telephones were new and expensive) and of fastidious cleanliness (even our telephones are sanitary) the discreetly marked trucks were well-received by housewives and the euphemism quickly became universal in the trade. What's distinguishes the term "telephone sanitizer" among a great many other toilet-related euphemisms is the linguistic disconnect: few Americans seem to know the meaning of this British circumlocution. It shows both the British insistence on preserving a veneer of gentilities and the American willingness to attribute any amount of silliness to the British rather than assume the obvious and mundane. Almost as impressive as fooling an entire third of the population into leaving a supposedly doomed planet. |